Transcript

Backyard grilling is a great American summertime tradition. But, there’s some concern about grilling contributing to air pollution. Lester Graham reports you can reduce the pollution… it all depends on what you use:

So, let’s say you’ve got your charcoal. And now you’re squirting it with lighter fluid to get the fire going.

To get the fire started, Fisher throws about 7 or 8 pounds of hardwood lump charcoal into a chimney starter.

“I don’t use the lighter fluid, I just use the charcoal chimney. I figure if I’m going to be cooking wood, I don’t want to cook a lot of chemicals too. So that’s something. I don’t kid myself that this is at all healthy for the world. I sometimes joke about it, too, well there goes my carbon footprint. Suddenly I’m carbon Sasquatch.”

To find out if Fisher really is a carbon Sasquatch, I called up Eric Johnson in Switzerland.

“Basically the footprint of using charcoal is about 3 times higher than the footprint of gas.”

Johnson just published a study in the journal Environmental Impact Assessment Review. In it, he compared the carbon dioxide emissions – or carbon footprint – of the two most popular types of grills: charcoal and propane gas.

When it comes to straight up carbon emissions – gas grills win hands down. Run your gas grill for an hour; emit 5.6 pounds of carbon dioxide into the air. Use charcoal briquettes for an hour of grilling; emit a whopping 11 pounds of CO2.

Fair enough.

But what if we look at the total carbon cycle of propane gas, a fossil fuel and charcoal, which is a bio fuel?

For that answer, we’ll turn to Bill Currie. He’s a professor in the School of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan.

“You have to think about, can we replace the carbon back in the pool that charcoal came from? Can we replace it biologically over a reasonable period of time? And with charcoal, the answer is yes, we can re-grow those trees.”

That’s because charcoal is made out of wood, which is a renewable energy source. So if charcoal is harvested locally in a sustainable way, the re-grown trees can absorb the CO2 – which makes charcoal essentially carbon neutral. So charcoal made out of wood which is renewable. Propane gas on the other hand is made from oil. Not renewable.

“Fuels that are based on coal, oil, petroleum based fuel, it’s not possible to put that CO2 back where it was biologically in a reasonable amount of time. And that’s the big difference.”

But does any of this really matter? I mean, how important is grilling in the overall environmental scheme of things. Well Currie says it’s definitely not a big-ticket item like, say, the size of your house or the number of cars you have.

“It’s probably a small factor in the whole analysis. But at the same time, we make dozens or hundreds of these choices a day. And if we know that one alternative is better than another, these little things do matter because they add up.”

Especially when you consider that Americans are expected to use more than 60 million grills – both charcoal and gas – on July 4th. That’s the carbon equivalent of 900,000 trees. Now that’s a Carbon Sasquatch.

Transcript

The Environmental Protection Agency wants to make
the limit on nitrogen dioxide tighter. It’s a
pollutant that’s emitted by power plants, and we
all spew it from our cars’ tailpipes. Rebecca Williams
has more:

Nitrogen dioxide is bad stuff. It’s part of smog and it can trigger asthma attacks and other serious lung problems.

Bonnie Holmes-Gen is with the American Lung Association.

“People can have effects from exposure to nitrogen dioxide for even 30 minutes to an hour. This exposure is particularly harmful to anyone with asthma or other lung illnesses.”

There’s already a national standard for long-term exposure to nitrogen dioxide.

EPA wants to set a national standard for short-term exposure. And the American Lung Association thinks that’s great, but they want the long-term standard to be even tighter.

A tighter standard will mean cutting back on smokestack emissions and tailpipe pollution… and that’s always a tough sell.

Transcript

This is The Environment Report. Well, the economy’s bad and global warming is getting worse. There’s a lot of talk about creating jobs in a new clean energy sector. Van Jones is President Obama’s special advisor for green jobs, enterprise, and innovation at the White House council on environmental quality.

Lester Graham: Mr. Jones, back in 2007, when you were in the non-profit world in California, we aired a report where you said we need a new sort of environmentalism:

Van Jones (from 2007 clip): We need less about the Birkenstocks and the tofu, although that stuff is all beautiful, but it’s more about the hard hat, the lunch bucket, more of a working class, “we can do it” environmentalism I think is the next step to a new environmental revolution.

Graham: Now that you’re in the White House, what are you advising the president to do to take the first steps in that direction?

Jones: Well, I think that if you look at what the President has done, we’re moving right in that direction. We had to do two things: we had to get the public investments right and we did that with the recovery package, where depending on how you do the math, we did between 20 and 60 billion dollars in clean energy efficiency. That’s the biggest single investment in clean energy in the history of humanity. So that public investment side we nailed down and now we got to get the public rules right, and that is our climate and clean energy jobs bill that was voted on the recently—through the house successfully. The future started on Friday, as far as I’m concerned, when you had a chamber of congress step forward and say, “We are gonna change the rules so that clean energy can compete and we are gonna make sure that all sectors of America—rural, industrial—have a chance to transition effectively. But we are gonna move into this clean energy economy. And that’s where the jobs come from—when you get the public rules right and the public investments right you get a boom that is sustainable and lasting. We saw that in telecom, we’ve seen that over and over again, and that’s where we’re going.

Graham: You’ve mentioned a lot of times about, we’ll see more jobs in harnessing energy from the sun, wind, water, smart biofuels, geothermal and advanced geothermal. And that climate change bill would do that, but it faces a tough time in the senate. How will the fate of that legislation affect growth in those green jobs areas?

Jones: Well, I think the senate is going to show the same courage at the end of the day that the House did. The President has been very clear over and over again that if we want the jobs of tomorrow, we’ve got to make the products of tomorrow, and the products of tomorrow will be advanced vehicles, advanced cars, and also advanced energy—wind turbines, solar panels, and all that stuff. And I think the senate has to make a choice: does it want to stay on the sinking ship of yesterday and have the United States fall further and further behind in the race for clean energy, where China is spending 12 million dollars an hour to corner that market on every renewable technology. So we’ll be importing wind turbines, solar panels, smart batteries from them, or are we going to suit up and get in this race. And I think the Senate, looking at the same facts the House just did, is gonna step up and match the President in his leadership and vision.

Graham: During the debate in the house last Friday, we heard a lot about the loss of jobs because of higher cost of energy, because of the reduction of the use of fossil fuels. How much might the creation of green jobs offset the loss of jobs because of what the conservatives and opponents of the bill say we’ll see?

Jones: I mean, everybody who has looked at this objectively—I mean, there’s some reports out there that are circulating from extreme ideological groups, that are kind of masquerading as these reports, you hear a lot of, “Oh you’ll lose two jobs for every one green job.” All that stuff has been debunked. The Wall Street journal looked at that stuff and said the methodology is flawed. What every serious study shows is that you will create many more jobs in a clean energy economy—you’ll have more work, more wealth, and better health for Americans when we are producing the technologies of the future. There are just not that many more jobs available in some of the legacy sectors. But, we can put… we have a wealth of solar power, wind power, and other power in this country that we’ve never tapped. The challenge facing America is simply this: can we tap our clean energy power centers and connect them to our population centers. We have a sun belt in this country that is a wealth of solar power but it doesn’t stop there—really on rooftops across America. We have wind potential in this country—gigantic wind potential—untapped. Not just in the plains states, but off our coasts, up in the Great Lakes area, in our mountains. These are potential power centers for the country. If you tap our clean energy power centers, connect them to our population centers, you create jobs in rural America, urban America, you advance our resource and technology agenda, you get our scientists engaged and you unleash innovation and entrepreneurship on this problem. And that’s how we’re not only going to beat the global warming problem, it’s also how we’re going to beat the global recession by putting Americans back to work.

Graham: Who do you envision getting these jobs? Are we talking about out of work, blue-collar workers getting green-collar jobs or are we talking about low income folks who need training?

Jones: Well, the great thing about this green wave that President Obama is talking about is that it’s a green wave that can lift all boats. You’re talking about jobs from the GEDs to the PHDs and back again. And you’re talking about giving somebody who, maybe they were working in the automotive sector and they’ve been thrown out of work, well, Hilda Solis just put 50 million dollars, our secretary of labor, toward retraining those workers and giving them the opportunity to become green workers. If you know how to make a car, you probably know how to make a wind turbine and other things, with a little bit of retraining. If you were a home builder—we’re probably not going to be building am lot of homes in the next 12 months, 18 months—but we have five billion dollars in the recovery package for helping those home builders and others go into the work of rebuilding homes, upgrading homes, for energy efficiency, weatherization, retrofitting building. If you’re a farmer, if you’re in rural America, if you like at the recovery package, if you look at the climate bill there are opportunities to grow smart advanced biofuels, to put upwind turbines on your acreage, to become a part of the solution by grabbing carbon out of the air with your tilling and with your agricultural practices. Every part of America can play a role from the GEDs to the PHDs. The other thing that’s so important: get people on the ground floor, low-income people, people who are marginalized, people who have not had good economic opportunities—let’s get them in on the ground floor so that they can… maybe this summer their installing a solar panel, next summer if that firm grows, they can become a manager, and then an owner, an inventor, an investor. Green pathways to prosperity are available if we move now, seize the opportunity, and make sure all Americans get a chance to play.

Graham: When you talk to homeowners, many of the middle class homeowners get all excited about the gee-whiz stuff of solar panels on the roof, maybe a backyard wind turbine, but most people skip the first step, and that is weatherization. You’ve been talking about weatherization for not just homes, but buildings in general for a while now. How much employment could there be in just that sector alone?

Jones: Well, if we got serious and aggressive and said we wanted to retro-fit the majority of our building stock, you’re literally talking about millions of jobs. And what’s so exciting about that is we are an advanced industrial country, we have a lot of building stock, but it was built using what are now outdated technologies, outdated materials. The chance to go back through all of those buildings and blow in clean, non-toxic insulation, replace ill-fitting windows and doors with the new high-performance windows, putting in the high-performance boilers and furnaces—all that is work, but it’s work that pays for itself in energy cost savings. So you’re talking about going back and upgrading our buildings and cutting unemployment, cutting energy costs, cutting pollution from our power plants, which will have to work less hard. And at the same time, you say “How are you going to pay for it?” Well, it can pay for itself through the energy cost savings. That’s why the President but 5 billion dollars, as opposed to the last term’s 200 million, five billion into energy efficiency for people of moderate income, because we know it’s not just the solar panels, which everybody likes, the gee-whiz stuff as you said, it’s also the caulking guns. It’s also those existing technologies that right now are sitting on the shelf. You’ve got workers sitting on the bench—stand those workers up, let them take those technologies off the shelf, and get out there and retrofit America, save money on energy bills and also put people to work.

Graham: Conservatives, some members of Congress, some think tanks have expressed some concern that businesses, ne’er-do-wells, will grab government money saying their creating green jobs when in reality it simply might be the difference between and janitor or a lawyer working for a bank, and a janitor or a lawyer working for a solar panel installer or environmental group. What are you doing to make sure we’re actually creating green collar jobs with the taxpayer money that’s being used to kick-start those jobs?

Jones: Well, you know, one of those things is that we have more commitment to transparency and accountability in this program, the recovery program, than in the history of the Republic because we have the technology now that makes this stuff a lot more possible. We’re very confident that we’re going to be able to make sure that we get the maximum benefit to the American people out of the recovery dollars. I think that sometimes we don’t worry about the right things. Often the upshot of that is that therefore the government should sit back and do nothing, we should let people pay too-high energy bills, we should let workers go idle, we should continue to pump massive amounts of carbon-pollution, heat trapping pollution, into the atmosphere, and continue to let Asia and Europe get all of the jobs of tomorrow. And I think the problem with that way of thinking is that it has nothing to do with the way Americans have been for the past 200 hundred years. This is the one country in the world that has always leaned forward into change; we’ve always led the change. Talking about the industrial revolution, the information revolution, the space race—we weren’t afraid of the future. We went out and defined the future, created the future. And for some reason we’ve had stagnation in our energy sector, which we’re now finally busting through. We’re shattering that old logjam that we’ve had where we were told that if we tried to do right by our grandchildren environmentally, to give them the best possible future, we would be starving our children economically. We would have to take care our children economically or our grandchildren environmentally but we couldn’t do both. Well, Barack Obama has shattered that old logjam, that false choice, he says no we can actually do great by our children economically, grow our economy, but do it using the clean and green and new technologies that will also take care of our grandchildren environmentally. And that’s the breakthrough. You know, you’re always going to have naysayer’s but they’ve never won in American politics, and they’re not going to win on this one either.

Graham: I’m wondering if there’s anything you think we should be talking about that I haven’t asked you about so far?

Jones: Well, I just think that the courage of the president to actually run for office talking about environmental issues as he did, talking about clean energy jobs and green jobs as he did, and then to actually use his political capital to get it done, is something that is extraordinary. I think sometimes we take this stuff for granted. But I’m someone, again, coming from outside of electoral politics, more working at the community level, I’ve always seen politicians come and they make all these promises to the community and as soon as they get elected you never hear from them again. Here’s an administration I’m proud to be a part of, that made a bunch of promises around healthcare, made a bunch of promises around the environment, and the economy, and education, and we’re actually beginning to deliver. And my big hope is that not only do we restore our economy, and restore our environmental health, we can begin to restore people’s confidence that government and community and people working together can actually solve tough problems again. This is not the only tough problem we’re going to have to solve in this century but I hope we’ll be able to set a good example on this one.

Graham: Van Jones is the special advisor on Green Jobs to President Obama. Thanks for talking with us.

Jones: Well, thank you.

Graham: That’s The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Van Jones is a special advisor on green jobs, working with President Obama. He spoke with The Environment Report’s Lester Graham.

Related Links

These mountain pine beetles are very destructive, killing millions of trees (Photo courtesy of the Rocky Mountain Research Station)

For more than a decade, mountain pine beetles have been devastating

forests in Canada and the Western United States. Colorado
has been hit especially hard. Millions of dead pines are creating the potential for huge forest fires. So, the trees are being cut
down. Conrad Wilson reports, some business are using that
timber:

Transcript

For more than a decade, mountain pine beetles have been devastating

forests in Canada and the Western United States. Colorado
has been hit especially hard. Millions of dead pines are creating the potential for huge forest fires. So, the trees are being cut
down. Conrad Wilson reports, some business are using that
timber:

(sound of a beetle)

That’s the sound of mountain pine beetles hard at work, laying
eggs beneath a tree’s bark. That kills the tree.

Here in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains,
two million acres of pine trees have been killed.

But the same destruction caused by the bugs has also created an
opportunity.

The beetles introduce a fungus that stains the wood a unique
blue. And that’s caught the attention of Colorado’s woodworkers. They’re using the wood for everything from furniture to decking.

(sound of sawing and pounding)

Outside Boulder, a company called Kitchens by Wedgewood is using the wood for
cabinets.

Wedgewood President Jim Ames says his company started working
with the timber three years ago.

Despite the drop in the housing market, Ames says customers like the blue stained finish.

“People are starting to ask for it more and more. Again, as
we get into this green movement, everybody wants to see what all those
dead trees in Colorado look like when they’re turned into a cabinet door.”

Ames says, with so many trees being killed, there will be enough timber to make beetle
wood cabinets for the rest of his lifetime.

For The Environment Report, I’m Conrad Wilson.

Related Links

A creek runs through Melvin Hershberger's farm in Holmes County, Ohio.
He was able to clean up the water with money from the Alpine Cheese Company.
The company needed to offset phosphorous pollution from its factory, so it pays farmers to
reduce their manure runoff. (Photo by Julie Grant)

Hershberger has 54 milking cows. Their manure used to run into the waterways.
Now the cows are fenced away from the creek. (Photo by Julie Grant)

Transcript

When you hear about dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes, they’re largely caused by pollution draining from the farm belt. It can take a long time and a lot of money to reduce pollution at factories. So they’re starting to pay farmers to cut pollution instead. Julie Grant explains:

When you eat cheese, you might not realize that something so delicious creates a lot of waste. And that waste – that pollution – ends up going into the drain. It eventually ends up in rivers and lakes.

(sound of a factory)

We’re at a cheese factory in Holmes County, Ohio where they make nearly 60,000 pounds of cheese a day.

The big stainless steel vats look immaculate. But our shoes are wet.

Bob Ramseyer is CEO of the Alpine Cheese Company.

He says the floors are covered with water because the equipment is constantly being washed.

“We have a pre-rinse – that goes to drain. We have a final rinse, and that goes to drain. And we have all the floors that are flushed down and so forth, so that all ends up as part of the wastewater.”

The cheese factory’s wastewater includes not only those caustic chemical cleaners, but wasted milk by-products. One milk nutrient is the chemical, phosphorous.

About a decade ago, the Environmental Protection Agency told Ramseyer that the cheese company had to reduce the phosphorous it was releasing into the nearby river. Ramseyer was concerned.

“The equipment alone was going to cost a half million dollars. We projected it was going to cost between a half million dollars and a million dollars a year in operating costs. So we were looking for any way we could to reduce that cost. That’s where we got into the nutrient trading program.”

Alpine Cheese was among the first to negotiate what’s called a nutrient – or water quality – trading program. Instead of reducing the phosphorous coming from his factory, he pays farmers to reduce manure – another source of phosphorous – from washing from feedlots into the river.

But a lot of the manure was washing off his farm into the streams. Herberberger says the cows were grazing right around the water.

“With the cows being in the creek we could see dirty water. The rocks were covered with dirt from cow’s waste. You walk through the stream, you’d kick up dirt and waste from the cows.”

Hershberger didn’t like it, but he didn’t have money to change it.

So when the County Soil and Water Conservation District held a neighborhood meeting to explain that Alpine Cheese was going to pay to reduce pollution from nearby farms, Hershberger saw a way to afford to clean up his farm.

He did about a dozen projects to reduce manure run-off into the water, like building a fence to keep the cows out of the stream.

And the little creek is bouncing back:

“As of now, it’s just totally clean, what you see. For the minnows and all the critters that are in the creek.”

Hershberger gets paid for the amount of phosphorous he keeps out of the water.

About 25 other farms in Holmes County are doing similar projects to reduce water pollution. And Alpine Cheese foots the bill. In exchange, the company doesn’t have to clean up wastewater coming from the cheese factory.

It’s a lot like a cap and trade program on water pollution.

There are a growing number of small programs like this around the country. But some people are trying to create water trading projects on a much larger scale.

That would mean a factory in one state might be able to pay farmer in another state. Eventually, all of the thousands of factories in just one river basin could pay farmers enough to reduce dead zones like the one in the Gulf of Mexico and in some of the Great Lakes.

Transcript

The climate change bill heads to the Senate. In all likelihood, so will some inaccurate statistics. Lester Graham reports some opponents of the climate change and energy bill are still using numbers they’ve been told are wrong:

Opponents in the House argued last Friday that the climate change bill would make energy much more expensive.

For example, Congressman Paul Broun, a Republican from Georgia, said it would hit low-income people especially hard.

“People who can least afford to have their energy taxes raised by – MIT says, by over $3100 per family.”

Several opponents used that $3100 figure. But, that’s just not correct.

In April we talked to the author of that MIT study, John Reilly.

“They’re really kind of just misinforming the debate and trying to scare people with numbers that really aren’t accurate.”

Reilly says he’s told the Republicans they’ve got the numbers wrong.

“The right number is actually $340 not $3100 or something.”

And a Congressional Budget Office analysis indicates the cost could be even lower.

Related Links

With Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner aims to educate Americans about the realities of the food industry (Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

A new film documentary that’s hitting theaters now looks at the underbelly of the food industry. We’ve all heard about food recalls because of E.coli bacteria contamination. There was peanut butter, hamburger, spinach – and the list goes on. Lester Graham reports the documentary, Food Inc., looks at why food gets contaminated and reveals a lot more about our industrial approach to producing food:
http://environmentreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/feature_graham_062909.mp3

Transcript

A new film documentary that’s hitting theaters now looks at the underbelly of the food industry. We’ve all heard about food recalls because of E.coli bacteria contamination. There was peanut butter, hamburger, spinach – and the list goes on. Lester Graham reports the documentary, Food Inc., looks at why food gets contaminated and reveals a lot more about our industrial approach to producing food:

This documentary is disturbing. It shows some of the things that happen to our food behind the scenes.

“There is this deliberate veil, this curtain, that’s dropped between us and where are food is coming from. The industry doesn’t want you to know the truth about what you’re eating, because if you knew, you might not want to eat it.”

The film, Food Inc., looks at how raising animals and growing crops have been industrialized from the farm to the grocery store.

Food processors have relied more and more on technological and chemical fixes to food contamination problems and storage issues instead of questioning whether the assembly line factory, mass production approach is the best way of handling food.

It looks at how companies such as Monsanto are treating farmers who want to save their seeds to replant next year – hint — involves lawyers and lawsuits.

It looks at how companies fight against labeling that would give consumers more information on packages. They say more information might unnecessarily scare their customers.

And it uses video from hidden cameras to show how animals are treated at big factory slaughterhouses.

Robert Kenner is the film’s producer/director. He thinks most people won’t like what they see.

But, he also says things can change. If people think about it, they actually vote with their forks three times a day.

“On some level, I think it’s going to be lead by moms who don’t want their children to be eating this food that’s making them sick.”

Kenner says these massive food recalls we’ve seen over the last several years are bad enough, but there’s a greater threat to our health.

“Obviously E.coli and things like that are very frightening, but ultimately it’s the everyday stuff that we don’t see – such as the sugar, salt and fat – that are making us fat. And that’s what I think needs to be changed most. That we get food that’s healthy and that we don’t subsidize food that’s making us sick.”

He says those foods subsidized by the government are the kinds of ingredients that are causing some of the leading health problems, such as early onset of diabetes and heart disease.

“All those snackfood calories are the ones that come from the commodity crops – from the wheat, from the corn, and from the soybeans. By making those calories really cheap, that’s one of the reasons the biggest predictor of obesity is income level.”

Pollan says it’s wrong when it’s cheaper to buy a cheeseburger than it is to buy broccoli.

The director and producer of Food Inc., Robert Kenner says he knows the film spends a lot of time looking at the dark side.

But he also gives some of the progressive food processors and even Wal Mart credit. He says they’re doing something about meeting the consumer demand for better, safer and more healthy foods.

“There are lots of great options out there and they are growing options.”

Such as farmers markets, grocery stores letting you know if food is grown locally, and a growing selection of organic foods.

Kenner says he hopes his film, Food Inc., not only outlines the problems with how our food is handled, but gets people to start asking questions about the choices they make when it’s time to eat.

People like the idea of using rooftop solar or wind power to generate the electricity and selling extra back to the power companies. It’s called net metering.

But some state regulations don’t allow it.

James Rose is the Senior Policy Analyst for the Network for New Energy Choices. He says these days more states are smoothing the way for net metering.

“It started out looking like a very big patchwork quilt – where some states are doing well, other states aren’t doing well, other states aren’t doing anything – to more of a regional mosaic, now where we see, like, the northeastern states in the United States to really improve their net metering. States out West such as Colorado and California are leading the way.”

Some power companies block net metering where they can.

But Rose says as lawmakers watch neighboring states implement net metering, and then embrace the idea for their own states.

Transcript

There’s a kind of blue and green scum that can bloom in lakes and ponds across the nation. This scum is called cyanobacteria. For years, scientists have known that this stuff can produce dangerous toxins. Amy Quinton reports now researchers are studying whether there’s a link between cyanobacteria and Lou Gehrig’s disease:

Jody Conner reaches into his refrigerator in his lab.

“This is the cyanobacteria that we’ve collected. This one comes from Harvey Lake. See how green that sample is?”

He’s the Director of New Hampshire’s Limnology Center.

Conner has been collecting samples of cyanobacteria from lakes across New Hampshire.

It looks like green scummy algae on the surface of the water that can be several inches thick.

But it’s actually bacteria.

Conner says cyanobacteria feed on nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen that can come from runoff of lawn fertilizers or sewage.

“They need sunlight, phosphorus, and they seem to like the warmer waters. So, they really grow in mass numbers when they have all three of those.”

Jim Haney is a professor of biological sciences at the University of New Hampshire.

He says, in high enough concentrations, some cyanobacteria blooms can produce more than 70 different kind of liver toxins called microcystins.

“That scum can be toxic enough that it’s been estimated that only about 17 milliliters is enough to kill a small child. 17 milliliters is just a couple of teaspoons.”

Cyanobacteria blooms can also produce neurotoxins.

Haney, and other researchers, have embarked on research to find out if there’s a connection between cyanobacteria and patient’s with Lou Gherig’s disease – also known as ALS.

The research began when Doctor Elijah Stommel began mapping hundreds of ALS patients across New Hampshire.

Stommel is a neurologist at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.

He noticed the incidence of ALS was 2.5 times greater than the national rate around lakes known to have had significant cyanobacteria blooms.

Stommel says he found a particularly high cluster of patients on one lake in the western part of the state.

“We were able to establish that there appeared to be about a 25 fold increase in what one would expect to see for the ALS incidence.”

But he’s not sure if cyanobacteria are the culprit.

A few scientific studies have shown a particular type of neurotoxin found in cyanobacteria is also found in patients with ALS.

The neurotoxin is known as BMAA.

But it’s not known whether BMAA can trigger ALS.

Jim Haney says more research is needed.

“We know that, in the laboratory, a wide range of different types of cyanobacteria are able to produce BMAA. So, one of our goals this summer is to determine whether there are BMAA molecules in our lakes.”

So far, researchers haven’t found BMAA, and there are still a lot of unknowns about how people could be exposed.

Do you have to drink it or can you breathe it in the air?
How long do you need to be exposed to it before it causes damage?

Again, Doctor Elijah Stommel.

“If there is a link between cyanobacteria blooms and the toxins they make, and a neurodegenerative disease like ALS, then I think we should pursue that with as much vigor as we can. And I think the neurology literature would suggest there is an environmental trigger for ALS.”

But, scientists have not yet found that link.

If they do, Stommel says that link might help find ways to prevent the dangerous toxins, or block their effects.